A $2 million gift will establish a Doris Duke Conservation Scholars Program at UC Santa Cruz to increase diversity in the field of environmental conservation. The gift from the Doris Duke Foundation supports 80 students in four annual cohorts of 20 scholars. Erika Zavaleta, professor in environmental studies and holder of the Pepper-Giberson Chair, led the effort to bring the program to campus. The program is designed to attract promising, early-undergraduate students from underrepresented groups into courses of study that inspire and prepare them to become innovators and leaders in conservation. The project supports the goals of the Coastal Sustainability Initiative of the Campaign for UC Santa Cruz.

UC Santa Cruz ecologist Kristy Kroeker received one of the nation's most prestigious honors for young faculty members, a Packard Fellowship for Science and Engineering. The award from the David and Lucile Packard Foundation provides Kroeker $875,000 over the next five years to support her research, which focuses on how rapidly accelerating change in our environment alters marine ecosystems. Kroeker, who earned her undergraduate degree in marine biology at UC Santa Cruz in 2000, is assistant professor of ecology and evolutionary biology. Her award supports the Coastal Sustainability initiative of the Campaign for UC Santa Cruz.

Endowed chairs are the gold standard in higher education, helping to attract and retain faculty. It’s why the 30 percent increase in the number of chairs in the past year at UC Santa Cruz has been so important to the campus. The eight new $1 million chairs—in everything from screenwriting to open-source software—bring the campus total to 30. The new endowments were created when UC Santa Cruz donors met a matching fund challenge established by UC President Janet Napolitano. The new UC Santa Cruz chairs and donors are:

“My mother taught me to live a full and honest life,” says Bev Crair, who is honoring her mother's memory with a pledge to helping gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender youth. Her $50,000 pledge establishes the Ruth Bloch Crair Memorial Scholarship, an endowed fund for students at the UC Santa Cruz Lionel Cantú Queer Center. Crair decided, along with her wife, Lisa, to establish the chair in her mother’s name in part because she has such vivid memories of the conversation in which she shared with her that she is lesbian.

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The synergy of public and private investments

The high-impact research at UC Santa Cruz attracts significant grants and contracts from publicly funded agencies. They include NASA, the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, the National Endowment for the Arts, National Endowment for the Humanities, and many others. Government-administered funds awarded to UC Santa Cruz totaled $71 million in the past year. While the investment of federal and state funds typically focuses on very specific outcomes, the investment of private funds alongside these grants gives researchers greater flexibility to explore new lines of inquiry and discovery. Private investments—the gifts that make up the Campaign for UC Santa Cruz—are a critically important complement to public investments.

More than 700 friends of the university—including pioneer alumni, faculty, and staff–gathered under a huge tent on the East Field for Fiat Fifty, a gala dinner and celebration of the campus’s first 50 years. Foundation Medal honoree Alice Waters described UC Santa Cruz as an institution that “expresses so many of the values I cherish and I fight for every day.” It was a sentiment shared throughout the room, filled with those whose generosity of spirit and resources has made the university what it is today.

A passionate contingent of friends of renowned sculptor and educator Coeleen Kiebert (MS ’80) gathered at Cowell College to dedicate a patio in her name. Nearly 100 people from the community joined to contribute more than $100,000 toward the project. Their goal: celebrate the importance of the arts in education—and the importance of Kiebert in promoting the arts.

The campaign for UC Santa Cruz

The Campaign for UC Santa Cruz supports excellence across the university through increased private investment in the people and ideas shaping the future.

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